Say what you will about mobsters, they often have very good taste in music.
And thus on Thursday the 15th of December 1949, in the tradition of Owney Madden and his Cotton Club, Morris Levy and several friends opened a nightspot called Birdland, which for the next decade would be known as the Jazz Corner of the World.
True, not everyone called it that. Miles Davis argued that the real creative twinkle was still uptown, at places like Minton’s Playhouse on 118th St., where for years the black musicians had come after hours to pick up licks they could dilute enough for white folks to understand and then take them back downtown to make money.
Through the ’30s, the boom war years and a few seasons after, “downtown” had meant 52nd St., Swing Street, with its warren of small, smoky clubs. But now the swingers were yielding to the beboppers the likes of Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Charlie (Yardbird) Parker.
So now they came to Birdland, named for Parker and conveniently located around the corner, in a basement on Broadway between 52nd and 53rd.
Birdland was divided into three sections: a restaurant, a bar and the bullpen, where those of modest means could pay 75 cents to sit from 8 p.m. until closing time at 4.
On a good night, those six bits bought the best show in town. One evening, Art Tatum was invited onstage during a break in a Parker set. At the time there was heated argument in the jazz world the terms “jazz world” and “argument” actually being redundant whether Parker’s piano player, Bud Powell, had supplanted Tatum as the premier keyboardist of jazz. The blind Tatum, not unaware of this discussion, made a show of sitting on his left hand before he played two breathtaking pieces using only his right.
Doris Duke and Tennessee Williams hung out at Birdland. So did Jane Russell, Steve Allen and Frank Sinatra. “Symphony Sid” Torin broadcast his radio show nightly from a glass booth at the bottom of the stairs.
It seemed poised to last forever, except all music scenes are magnets for hustlers, and musicians are often eager accomplices in their own self-destruction.
Billie Holiday and Chet Baker lost their cabaret cards required for club work over heroin. Powell drank and Davis snorted. But in drug abuse, as in music, the standard was set by Bird.
When Parker helped open Birdland, he was only a couple of years removed from electroshock treatments, administered after he was found running naked through Los Angeles. He had fallen asleep in a heroin haze with a lighted cigaret in his hand and had run out to escape the subsequent fire.
A year after Birdland opened, Bird, too, lost his cabaret card, for his habit of showing up in no condition to play proving that some things hadn’t changed just because jazz moved around the corner from Swing Street.
In the early years of the century, 52nd St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves. was an affluent stretch of brownstones. Then the speakeasies displaced by the new Rockefeller Center moved in, and when Prohibition ended they stayed in business as late-night music clubs.
Fiorello LaGuardia’s vice crackdown of 1934 chased some of the shadiest characters into the background, making the scene exotic but safe, and Swing Street became a hip destination: the Onyx, the Famous Door, the Three Deuces, Leon and Eddie’s, Hickory House, Tillie’s Chicken Shack, Kelly’s Stables, the Downbeat, Jimmy Ryan’s, the Orchid.
Swing Street even trumped Jim Crow. Though jazz musicians were always a multi-racial crew, many clubs tried at first to maintain the Cotton Club tradition of keeping the white patrons apart from the black performers. But these were tiny joints, without a dance floor or even much of a stage, and mingling was inevitable. In the summer of 1938, jazz impresario John Hammond helped formally shut down the old policy when he made the Famous Door an offer: He would supply air conditioning if the club would book Count Basie and let his black friends in.
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Swing Street boomed through the war, with its endless parade of soldiers and sailors. But the good times also lured back the pimps, drug dealers and hustlers, and postwar crackdowns depleted the ranks of both clientele and musicians. Chano Pozo, whose Afro-Cuban conga rhythms brought down the house at Gillespie’s 1947 Carnegie Hall concert, was shot to death a year later when he talked back to his dealer.
By the end of the ’40s, most of the jazz clubs on Swing Street had gone dark or become strip joints, even as bebop was getting big enough to need a place of its own.
Bop had begun surfacing in the early ’40s at musicians’ hangouts, and it caught the midtown public’s ear with Gillespie’s famous gig at the Onyx in early 1944. Gillespie was unable to bring Parker in for that occasion, but Bird staked his own claim in September 1944 with a gig at the Three Deuces.
Around the same time, Morris Levy, a Bronx-born teenager with little formal education but boundless ambition, street smarts and connections, was working hat check in the clubs. Moishe, as everyone knew him, gradually got a piece of this and a piece of that some said with help from his family, which the feds said was the Genovese family and he was only 23 when he and eight associates opened Birdland.
Weeks later, George Shearing composed “Lullabye of Birdland” there in nine minutes, says the legend and Levy, who recently had learned that a publisher makes money every time a song is played, rode its publishing rights to a six-figure windfall.
Eventually he parlayed that money plus his Birdland profits into a publishing, record label and retail empire. He was indicted regularly for mob-related activities, but he beat everything except a final extortion rap in 1988. By then he was dying of cancer, so he never did get to the big house. When he cashed out in 1990, he was worth $75 million.
Charlie Parker died March 12, 1955, in the Stanhope Hotel, where a wealthy jazz fan had given him shelter; official cause was cirrhosis of the liver. In January 1959, Levy’s brother Zachariah was shot to death while working the Birdland bar; the killing went unsolved. In June 1964, Birdland filed a bankruptcy petition listing $103,778 in debts and $7,320 in assets.
First published on August 23, 1998 as part of the “Big Town” series on old New York. Find more stories about the city’s epic history here.
